The More You Know: Dallas ISD and Dallas County Schools Are Not the Same

After last week’s vote to dismantle Dallas County Schools, I learned that there are a few people that — despite lots of news coverage that should explain the difference — think Dallas County Schools and Dallas ISD are the same thing.

The day after the election, in fact, someone told me, “I voted to abolish DISD.” I took a deep breath, and said, “You mean DCS?”

“Same thing,” the person replied.

“No, Dallas County Schools is a transportation provider for nine different school districts,” I explained with the sainted patience of a thousand five hundred Jobs. “Dallas ISD is one of those districts, but in reality, DCS was a bus vendor that got to collect a one-cent per $100 valuation property tax from Dallas County citizens.”

“It did not educate children,” I continued. “It bussed them to schools, where the book learning took place.”

“But DISD’s board of trustees made the decisions for DCS,” the person insisted, in the way a lot of wrongly wrong so very wrong people do.

“No, DCS has — or rather, had — its own board of trustees that ran for office on the regular,” I said. “That board made decisions for DCS, based on what was reported to them by DCS staff and the DCS superintendent.”

“Well, DISD is in such bad shape that they might as well be the same thing,” the person insisted. “All the schools are failing.”

Sigh. This column would’ve been a lot shorter if this person hadn’t said that.

It was then that I pulled out my pie charts, my graphs, my Venn diagrams, and my three-act musical about what Dallas ISD has been up to (seriously, the latter has a song called, “No You’re Really Wrong,” and another called, “Have You Ever Been to Any School Ever?”).

Honestly, guys, I have no idea how this person found me because if they’d been a regular reader here they’d probably know that they best come prepared. Don’t come at me with a spork when I’m standing in a Wüsthof shop.

“My son is in the Two-Way Dual Language Spanish Immersion program at a Dallas ISD school,” I wrapped up. “He can read, write, and speak two languages. And he’s at a normal, neighborhood, typical Dallas ISD school.”

There was this super long pause as the person at the other end of my Internet connection digested this fact tsunami.“So what did I vote for then?” the person asked.

Bethany Erickson

Bethany Erickson lives in a 1961 Fox and Jacobs home with her husband, a second-grader, and Conrad Bain the dog. If she won the lottery, she'd by an E. Faye Jones home.
She's taken home a few awards for her writing, including a Gold award for Best Series at the 2018 National Association of Real Estate Editors journalism awards, a 2018 Hugh Aynesworth Award for Editorial Opinion from the Dallas Press Club, and a 2019 award from NAREE for a piece linking Medicaid expansion with housing insecurity.
She is a member of the Online News Association, the Education Writers Association, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and the Society of Professional Journalists.
She doesn't like lima beans or the word moist.